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Urban Sprawl: Emptiness

The American landscape is vast, inspiring, filled with drama and beauty—but also a whole lot of nothing. These photographs explore the places in-between.

Photographs and text by Emmanuel Monzon

Urban Sprawl: Emptiness

The American landscape is vast, inspiring, filled with drama and beauty—but also a whole lot of nothing. These photographs explore the places in-between.

My pictures try to extract a form of aestheticism from the mundane urban landscape. Where most people only pass through, I stop and look for some form of poetic beauty. I like repetition and seriality. I also like driving around.

Through my “Urban Sprawl” series, I want to photograph the in-between state found so frequently in the vast American landscape. I capture places of transition, borders, passages from one world to another. Am I leaving a city or entering a new environment?

In my artwork there is no judgment, no denunciation—only the picture itself. If I could sum up the common theme of my photos, it would be about emptiness, silence.

—Emmanuel Monzon

If you liked this article, we’d also recommend these previous features: Topophilia, a finalist in our 2016 Street Photography Awards that captures the unsettling world of Europe’s urban environment; Boarded-Up Houses, Katharina Fitz’s report on the housing epidemic in post-industrial England; and The Middle Landscape, a visual exploration of the unique version of the “the pastoral” in the American midwest.